The Unique Visitors count is very important to website owners, in contrast to the number of Hits. Insidecostarica.com had an average of 1.116 unique visitors daily during the month July 04 for a total of 34.608 visits. Our success is also measured by the number of subscribers to our daily newsletter, which now is at 1.324. The newsletter is a compilation of the day's main page and comes in the subscriber's mailbox each morning.   As internet professionals, we have many different "tricks" we could use to bolster our HITS counter. But more HITS don't mean more sales. In May 04, ICR was approved by Google.com to their "adsense" program to deliver ads related to Costa Rica. Advertisers pay Google.com to display their ads, which in turn pay Us for the delivery of their ads. The Advertisers success is tied to the success of the delivery.

Web site promotion scam:  Using hits and visits in online marketing Online scam artists commonly advertise the number of hits on their web site to trick people into believing their web site gets a lot of traffic and makes their company a lot of money. What most people don't realize is that a web site's popularity is measured by the number of unique visitors, not the number of hits.

Now, ICR counts with some one and a half million hits every month.

And along with the hits comes criticism. Criticism about our content. Criticism that we don't cover this and that. Criticism about many things.

We fell this is good.

Criticism gets us think about some of the issues we tackle on a daily basis and provides a feedback when we go wrong or lose or way.

Criticism is our yardstick to measure our popularity, that we are still alive and doing well.

However, some criticism is unfounded, like when we get accused of fudging our numbers, the number of hits is what I am referring to.

So What Is A Hit, Really?

A hit is generated when someone visits a website. A hit is not a single visitor like most people tend to believe.

It is a file that is requested from your website in order to show the page like it is intended. This means, every single picture on your webpage is a hit plus the HTML-file itself.

For example, if the index.htm file has 10 different pictures included, 11 hits are registered to the website. If the visitor goes to a second page which has 4 pictures on it, 5 more hits are added, totaling 16 hits just by visiting two pages

So the number of hits doesn't actually say anything about a website or how many unique visitors the website had. It really doesn't mean much to the success of a website.

Therefore it is the most inaccurate statement if a company says their website had 17,000,000,000,0000,000 hits in a month . Often, the expression HITS is related to as an abbreviation for "How Idiots Track Success"!

So why do 'we' measure our success as related to HITS? Because, it is a measure that most people understand, and compare us to the competition, however it being inaccurate.

What is more important to us and any internet professional is the number of unique visitors.

A unique visitor can be defined as one computer making a request for web pages. It really doesn't matter how many pages on the website are visited. A Unique Visitor is counted only once during a specified time period, usually a 24 hour day period, no matter how many times that computer logs on to a website during the period.

A visitor can access the website many times and visit many pages during the course of the 24hour period, and only be counted as one visit.

On Insidecostarica.com, the Unique Visitors counter is reset each day and an accurate number of daily visits is maintained.

That is, no matter how many times you access the home page or any other page or pages on ICR during any 24 hour period, you will be counted only once. The clock is reset at 12midnight automatically by our server software that tracks and maintains website statistics.

From this day on, we will only report Unique Visitors and not Hits.

So, to all those criticize us, please don't stop. It really keeps on our toes, always looking for ways to better deliver the information that has slowly becoming the number one "online" source for Costa Rica news and information in English!